Introducing Hyperion for Android

I am a Software Engineer at WillowTree building Android apps and Android app accessories. I enjoy video games, board games, and good company.

EvanTatarka

Software Engineer

A few months ago we released Hyperion for iOS to the open-source world. Today, we are happy to announce the release of Hyperion for Android, a plug-and-play debug menu library designed to help fill in the gaps between design, development, and QA.

One of our goals was to emphasize the plug-and-play aspect of Hyperion, so we made it super easy to integrate Hyperion into your project: Add the Hyperion Core dependency, select any number of available plugins, and get to coding.

If a plugin doesn’t exist that meets your needs, we highly encourage creating your own! For detailed instructions on integrating Hyperion into your app or contributing your own plugin, check out our README.

Let’s take a look at the functionality of plugins available out of the box.

Attribute Inspector

Our eyes alone are only so effective for verifying the state of our app’s UI. The Attribute Inspector is useful for inspecting the state of views in your hierarchy. Certain properties are also mutable via the attribute inspector. This allows the user to change the text property of a TextView to examine how the layout reacts, for instance.

Measurement Inspector

This plugin allows you to inspect measurement information of views in your view hierarchy as they relate to other views. Similar to Zeplin, this overlay makes it simple to verify that margins or padding between views match the specification.

Crash Plugin

The Crash Plugin does not contribute any UI to the debug menu. Instead, this plugin sits quietly in the background awaiting any uncaught exceptions that might be thrown within your application. If this happens, it displays a screen with the exceptions call stack along with device metadata relevant for testing.

Phoenix Plugin

The Phoenix Plugin is a very simple plugin that allows the user to quickly and easily clear all of the app’s internal storage and restart the process. This can greatly enhance productivity around testing first-run functionality, for example.

Hyperion for Android can significantly reduce the pain of testing your application and will provide a more efficient workflow for your entire team. We can’t wait to hear your ideas for future plugins, and we are very excited to receive any and all feedback! Check out our Github repository to find more plugins, or learn how you can contribute your own!

(P.S. Special thanks to former Trees Chris Mays and Ben Alderfer for their work on this project!)

SeanAmos

I am a Software Engineer at WillowTree building Android apps and Android app accessories. I enjoy video games, board games, and good company.